Fifteen years ago, I was—as usual—in between jobs. I’d recently dropped out of graduate school and had been fired from one entry level job or another (either barista or receptionist, possibly both). I spent most of my time not looking for work, exactly, but thinking of looking for work. I also drank a lot. It was on one of these idle afternoons, waiting for the bar to open and casually perusing Craigslist, in, for some reason, Baltimore—a city I’d never been to nor had any intention of visiting—when I came across an ad that would, against the odds, change my life.
The ad has since been lost to the winds of time and internet atrophy, but the gist was this: a Baltimore-based online publication was looking for freelance writers. They were interested in pop culture, politics, film reviews, personal essays, etc. The only thing I’d had published at that point in my life was an article about sexist dress codes in my high school newspaper (boys were allowed to wear tank tops; girls weren’t) but I’d always wanted to be a writer and had recently started keeping a blog about my various misadventures, most of which involved losing jobs or drinking. Usually both. While I wasn’t totally convinced that the ad was legit and not a scam, I reached out, sending a link to my website.
It wasn’t a scam. I soon heard back from the site's editor, as well as publisher, and both said they were impressed with my samples and invited me to submit. They’d pay me $35 a pop. I was so thrilled at the opportunity—the validation, really—that I immediately forwarded their emails to my parents. Look, I wanted them to see. I’m not a loser. I’m a writer. This proves it.
The very first piece I published began like this:
I lost my keys a few days ago. As much as I like doing a gymnast move into my roommate’s bedroom window every time I lose my keys, it still sucks because what if my roommate was sleeping until I crawled through his window and what if he’s got morning wood, which I’ve never actually seen because I’m allergic to penises in the gayest way possible, but which I’ve heard about. This happens all the time. Losing shit, that is. My keys, my wallet, my phone—all are foster children that get yanked from me just when we’re getting close. I leave one or two or all three vital goods at the bar, go outside to smoke, and come back to nothing but a PBR that might very well be roofied.
The rest of the essay was about my steadfast belief that I’d someday be rich, famous, successful, even though I was unable to complete basic tasks like paying bills on time or keeping track of my keys. I wrote about my desire to hire a day laborer to follow me around and hold my stuff. It’s acutely embarrassing—not just that I actually lived like this but that I put it on paper. Reading it today is like reading old diary entries: unrecognizable, but even worse because it’s public.
That website was this one. Over the next few years, I wrote dozens of columns for Splice Today, all of which I regret. Looking back on them now, I see the work of a young degenerate desperately trying to make a life that was scarred by self-inflicted wounds and bad decisions sound, if not important, at least funny. One essay begins: I opened a Bad Boys II DVD a few days ago while internally debating whether to take a shower or to hose myself off in the kitchen sink. Did that really happen, I wonder? Probably. I did have a nice sink.
As I’ve aged, I’ve moved away from personal writing and towards the political, but back then, I was all about the personal essay. In retrospect, my life didn’t deserve to be documented, but the personal essay had one advantage over, say, journalism or fiction: It was easy and fun. I didn’t have to make any phone calls or read any primary sources. I didn’t have to follow history or politics. I didn’t even have to make stuff up. All I had to do was write down what was going on in my own life, add an observation about the state of the world, a joke or two, and send it off.
It was a good time for personal essays: The early-2010s were the heyday of BuzzFeed, xoJane, Thought Catalog, Jezebel, and other sites that would publish anyone or anything as long as it was personal enough. Sometimes they paid in dollars; more often they paid in “exposure.” It’s a fitting term, although, as a currency, it’s about as useful as Monopoly money.
While standouts in the genre can be brilliant, beautiful, timeless, revelatory, I was no Joan Didion. I was more like the authors of viral xoJane essays with titles like “I Slept With My Therapist” or “I Don’t Like My Best Friend’s Baby," except those writers had the good sense to stay anonymous. If I had more foresight, I might’ve at least used a pseudonym, but then I’d have had to give up the thing I wanted most: credit.
When the golden age of the confessional essay died off, it was memorialized by think pieces about… why the golden age of the confessional essay died off. In 2014, Slate’s Laura Bennett called it “The First-Person Industrial Complex.” She wrote of the primarily young women who mined their own trauma for material and who often felt exploited after an essay about what may have been the most harrowing experiences of their lives—abuse, violence, suicide, a bad date—would go viral, leaving her with, at best, a meager paycheck and, at worst, a reputation she couldn’t escape and an editor who wouldn’t call her back.
I never felt that way about this website or anywhere else. I’m grateful to Splice Today because those first bylines made me think I could be a writer. And I did become one: It took a while to make a career out of it, but in the past 15 years, I’ve written hundreds of articles for various outlets. I’ve had two staff writing jobs, a moderately successful podcast, and have a book coming out this fall. Maybe this would have happened without that particular first gig, but I needed someone to tell me that I could write. This place did that.
So my discomfort with this old work is not because I was exploited. It’s because I was so proudly careless with my stories—and with my life. I wrote this, for instance, about dropping out of grad school:
Characteristically, I bungled dropping out by writing on my withdrawal form that I was quitting because graduate school made me want to kill myself. I was kidding, of course, but I received a phone call from the octogenarian dean hours after submitting the form, panicked that I was lining up pills or inching toward a ledge. I explained that if anything made me want to kill myself it would be far more interesting than graduate school, and thanked her for a two-year reprieve from employment.
I really did that. At the time, it seemed funny. It still does. But it also seems a little psychotic.
Even worse, I was careless with other people’ stories too. I once wrote an essay about my first crush—a guy who, at the time of publication, was dying of ALS—and I didn’t even bother to change his name. When I read that essay today, physically cringing with each line, the same thought kept flashing through my head. What the hell was I thinking? My only answer is, I wasn’t.
When, on occasion, my parents would dip into my oeuvre and email me some unsolicited feedback, it usually went like this: “Be careful. The internet never forgets.” This is and isn’t true. A careless Snapchat posted at 16—maybe a white girl singing along to all the words of "Mo Money Mo Problems"—can be screenshot, saved, archived and come back to haunt her years later. That happens. But websites die all the time, either because someone neglects to pay the hosting fee or because they just waste away, un-updated until they become obsolete. There’s probably a graveyard somewhere of long forgotten GeoCities and Live Journal sites, vines growing over the text. And in some places, people can even demand that unfavorable content be, if not erased from the internet, at least de-indexed, making it invisible to search.
In the EU, for instance, there’s a law called the Right to be Forgotten. It stems from a 2010 court case in which a Spanish attorney requested that Google remove a 1998 newspaper article about his unpaid debts from search results. He argued that the article was harming his reputation even though the debts had been paid off for years. The court agreed. Now, residents there have the right to request that Google and other search engines exclude some content from search results.
It’s hard to imagine any such regulation passing constitutional muster here in the U.S., where the First Amendment gives media, individuals, and companies broad protections from censorship. Plus, culturally, we tend to prize the public’s right to know over privacy. As a journalist, I consider this a good thing. People shouldn’t be able to hide the truth with a simple takedown request. It’s erasing the historical record, and while this Spanish lawyer’s old debt might not have been newsworthy, real criminals have used this law to cover their pasts, or at least try to. One notable example is Paul Termann, a German national who shot and killed two people during an altercation on a yacht in the early-1980s. After 20 years in prison, Termann was released, and he later sued to have articles about his conviction delisted from search engines, arguing that the articles violated his privacy and impeded his ability to get on with his life. A German court agreed, and if you google Paul Termann today, the articles you’ll see aren’t about the murder, per se, but about his attempt to hide it. I guess it takes more than a court order to launder a reputation like that.
I don’t want to live in a country where you can’t call a murderer a murderer. And yet, even though, for my work, I pore over old articles and blog posts as though they are sacred texts, another part of me wishes I, too, could just file a takedown request and see all those old essays go up in smoke. We’re not talking about newsworthy investigations of a powerful person or even a two-bit murderer; we’re talking about overwrought personal essays by a 25-year-old who was, for some reason, convinced that her life was interesting (it wasn’t). I’m not trying to hide what I did or what happened back then; in fact, my forthcoming book details some of the same stories I wrote about in my youth. I just don’t want people to read those particular essays, and so I’ve done what I can to erase the evidence: If I own it, it no longer exists. I destroyed all evidence of my blog years ago and I even requested exclusion from the Wayback Machine, the internet archive that captures everything in its reach. At this point, the only trace that remains is the form of broken links.
Unfortunately, I don’t own all my old work. The publications do, and while 35 bucks and validation from strangers online seemed like more than adequate compensation when I was desperate for a byline, I barely recognize those essays today. (I do, however, recognize the person who wrote them. She was very fun although not the most reliable figure… unless what you needed was someone to go-go dance in a horse head mask on short notice. In that case, she was your girl.) If my old posts were a diary, I’d burn it, but since there’s no paper to light, I’ve done the next best thing: contacted publications and asked them to delete my old work. Is this wrong? Maybe so. I’m asking to take back something I willingly gave up: the right to my own work.
As for whether or not a publisher should comply with an author’s takedown request, I think it depends. If someone, say, admitted to tax fraud and then woke up with next-day regrets, the publisher probably shouldn’t comply. But what about articles that have no public interest? Articles like mine? Maybe the answer is to treat these requests on a case by case basis—and to be transparent about it. Leave an editor’s note, something like: “The author of this piece is now in her 40s and regrets telling the world that she once blacked out and ate the dried popcorn off her in-laws’ Christmas tree. She regrets the error.”
I wanted to know how other people think about scrubbing the internet, so I reached out to Ben Smith. A longtime media analyst, Smith is currently the editor-in-chief of Semafor. Before that, he was a media columnist at The New York Times, and before that, he was the editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed News, an outlet with its own archives of millennial confessions.
“I don't think there's an ethical issue in taking your work down,” Ben told me in an email. “The kind of media we do is ephemeral. It used to wrap dishes and isn't even good for that any more. Its value falls quickly from the place and time it was published.”
But, he added, even if it’s not unethical to scrub this work, there may still be some value in keeping it alive. “Old work still occasionally delights or informs someone about that time and place and even who you used to be,” he wrote. “I guess it makes me a little sad that you're doing it, and you might underestimate the degree to which anyone reading it now will understand it doesn't define you.”
I am attempting to erase a small bit of history, albeit a history that matters only to me. And not everyone agrees with Ben. Some outlets have strict no-takedown policies. No one wants to be accused of a coverup, even if the target is just bad writing, and a blanket policy certainly cuts down on requests. Then again, no one would argue that it’s unethical to delete your old blog about following the Avril Lavigne Bonez Tour for six weeks in the summer of 2005. So why is it okay to delete one’s own tracks but not okay to ask a publisher to delete them for you? I suppose there is a difference, but I’m not sure I could explain it.
Regardless, my begging has worked, both here and elsewhere. If you go to my author page at Splice Today now, you won’t see the essay I wrote about watching Law & Order SVU for 20 hours straight or the one about learning to make prison wine from an ex-con who’d just gotten out or the one about my phobia of upholstered furniture. All that’s gone now, thanks to publisher Russ Smith, who agreed to wipe the archives on my request. I’m grateful to him—not just for the start, but for allowing me, 15 years later, to be forgotten. In exchange, I’m giving him this: one more piece for the website that, somehow, really did change my life. I hope I don’t regret it.
—Katie Herzog is the co-host of the podcast Blocked and Reported and the author of the forthcoming book Drink Your Way Sober: The Science-Based Method to Break Free from Alcohol.